Just as the Grecian basileus, so the Aztec military chief was misrepresented as a modern prince. Morgan was the first to submit to historical criticism the reports of the Spaniards who first misapprehended and exaggerated, and later on consciously misrepresented the functions of this office. He showed that the Mexicans were in the middle stage of barbarism, but on a higher plane than the New Mexican Pueblo Indians, and that their constitution, so far as the garbled accounts show, corresponded to this stage: a league of three tribes which had made a number of others tributary and was administered by a federal council and a federal chief of war, whom the Spaniards construed into an "emperor." CHAPTER V. ORIGIN OF THE ATTIC STATE. How the state gradually developed by partly transforming the organs of the gentile constitution, partly replacing them by new organs and finally installing real state authorities; how the place of the nation in arms defending itself through its gentes, phratries and tribes, was taken by an armed public power of coercion in the hands of these authorities and available against the mass of the people; nowhere can we observe the first act of this drama so well as in ancient Athens. The essential stages of the various transformations are outlined by Morgan, but the analysis of the economic causes producing them is largely added by myself. In the heroic period, the four tribes of the Athenians were still installed in separate parts of Attica. Even the twelve phratries composing them seem to have had separate seats in the twelve different towns of Cecrops. The constitution was in harmony with the period: a public meeting (agora), a council (bule) and a basileus. As far back as we can trace written history we find the land divided up and in the possession of private individuals. For during the last period of the higher stage of barbarism the production of commodities and the resulting trade had well advanced. Grain, wine and oil were staple articles. The sea trade on the Aegean Sea drifted more and more out of the hands of the Phoenicians into those of the Athenians. By the purchase and sale of land, by continued division of labor between agriculture and industry, trade and navigation, the members of gentes, phratries and tribes very soon intermingled. The districts of the phratry and the tribe received inhabitants who did not belong to these bodies and, therefore, were strangers in their own homes, although they were countrymen. For during times of peace, every phratry and every tribe administered its own affairs without consulting the council of Athens or the basileus. But inhabitants not belonging to the phratry or the tribe could not take part in the administration of these bodies.